Sponsored links are the new spam

educate Washington

Steven Frank drew the webcomic Spamusement from 2004 to 2007. The schtick was “Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!”

It was a genius idea. Frank encouraged other people to draw their own, based on spam they’d received. Back in the day, I drew about a dozen. Drawing them was a pleasant kind of mental palate cleanser, doodling that was tethered loosely to the verbal part of my brain.1

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Animals which are also transitive verbs

In a recent conversation with Cristyn, we somehow came to be talking about the sentence: Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

This sentence, sometimes with a couple of extra “Buffalo”, is often used as an example of a grammatical sentence which is hard to parse.1 In a less perplexing form, it says: Bison whom bison baffle— they themselves baffle bison.

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What might be said about pragmatism

Today was the last class meeting of my pragmatism seminar. I had the students each make a presentation on their seminar papers in-progress. Some students were further along in their thinking others, but it gave everyone a chance to try out arguments and to exchange ideas.

The course syllabus covered more than 20 authors, but student interest was fairly focused.

  • 2 students are writing on issues of truth and objectivity.
  • 3 students are writing on Jane Addams and ethical method.
  • 2 students are writing on issues of ethical method and objectivity, one with an eye toward Nelson Goodman and the other by way of C.I. Lewis.

All the projects sound interesting, but I wouldn’t have expected this distribution.

Because this was me, the readings were weighted more toward philosophy of science and epistemology than toward ethics and value theory. But nobody is writing about philosophy of science. 😒

Jane Addams was a late addition to the syllabus, and I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out until the class meeting on her work. She was a hit. 😃

Now it’s just grading and administrative work between me and the end of the semester. 😰

New fallacies: diving rod, palm reader

Via Daily Nous, I encountered two new informal fallacies. Keith Payne, Laura Niemi, and John Doris coin them in writing about implicit bias at Scientific American.

  1. picture of a philosopherthe divining rod fallacy: On the basis of an instrument or scale for measurement being problematic, inferring that the property which it measures is not real. “[J]ust because a rod doesn’t find water doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as water.”
  2. the palm reading fallacy: Expecting psychological or sociological phenomena which occur at the group level to yield predictions about particular group members. “[U]nlike palm readers, research psychologists aren’t usually in the business of telling you, as an individual, what your life holds in store.”

You should feel free to diagnose these fallacies in the arguments of your interlocutors. I’ve added them to my list.